The muse Capricious
Fri, Nov. 16th, 2007 06:14![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jarissaClearly one of the pre-Classical Muses, she has lately decided that my head will be full of scenes and phrases right up to the very second where I try to record them -- by typing, by writing, even by speaking them aloud, it doesn't matter. They all jumble up the very instant I try to let them out of my head. I've been this way for months, worse, and feel this guilty suspicion that the problem may be my own laziness: maybe I'm subconsciously avoiding some hard, but necessary, work that needs to be done.
In the main superhero setting, Feral ((not a Marvel character, tyvm)) is dying and the scene stays frozen that way, even though I can see very plainly how she could survive (or how she could fail to survive, if that's how the story should go); it's like she's abdicating responsibility for telling me the rest of the tale, and I'm certainly not going to let her get away with that. Angst gives me hives. Either she dies of damnfoolishness, which (frankly) would be an unfortunate conclusion to her story but the other characters would grieve and then life would go on; or she accepts the onus for her own chance at redemption, and survives the villain's trap, and maybe starts being proactive in her relationships for a change.
Feral's not the sort of person destined to die of old age; she knows that, I know that, and we've both known since we met, back in late 1991. Actually, now that I think of it, I think I was starting to form the basis of the character back in the late eighties, but the woman I know really bears very little resemblance to the proto-idea I first contemplated back when ThunderCats started airing right after the "English for NYC Spanish Speakers" show I used to watch before school every morning. (( Parenthetically, if you're taking a foreign language class first thing in the school day, I cannot highly enough recommend two tools: read comic books actually written for native speakers of the language you're trying to learn, not those Learning Tools marketed to your teacher with perfectly stilted grammar; and watch a program to teach native speakers of said language how to speak your own native language, preferably while you're getting dressed and making your bed. My vocabulary was lousy but I could talk my way around most subjects even if I couldn't figure out the word I was supposed to be using, and it entertained my teacher well enough that I got away with it half the time. Me and my Californian+New Yawrker Latina accent.... ))
I digressed. Sorry.
Anyhow, God knows we haven't always liked each other, and she embodies a surprising amount of my judgmental side, but we've gotten pretty comfortable inside each others' skins. As I said, we've both always known she'd die of either stupidity or need, bad decision on her part or saving others. She'd prefer the latter, of course: she thinks it's the only path to redemption that she hasn't already destroyed. Other people around her would disagree, but they don't seem to have any clue just how integral to her core motivation is the idea she has that she needs to atone for past misdeeds and failures. She doesn't discuss it, after all, not even a vague mention. She also thinks her supposed sins are a lot more terrible than they actually are, which is a lot of her problem in the first place. It's a kind of hubris that I'd like to see her recognize and avoid, but it's not central to events often enough for us to get any real work done on it. We've had some progress over the years, but nowhere near enough, and now she's lying on the flagstones with the prong of a grappling hook jammed into a particularly delicate section of the torso, endangering so many fast-bleeding vital organs that her regenerative abilities (way below Wolverinish levels) really have no logical ability to keep up, and she's just gotten a glimpse of her current archnemesis -- who, of course, wanted her to see him just long enough to know who'd arranged the whole trap -- and instead of focusing on getting help so she can survive, her mind keeps drifting back to the way she thought (years ago) she would die, looking up through the branches of a tree at the afternoon sky ....
.... and that's exactly where the scene freezes. Dead? Snaps out of it? The other characters on her side know she's in trouble but nobody's got Supervision or magic fixit powers, they can't save her if she won't tell them "extract the sharp pointy thing quickly and stop the leaking and watch out for Stirge while I'm unconscious, he won't like it if I'm not bleeding to death and he'll probably try to interfere again". But one of them's telepathic enough that she's not slipping into her death fantasy without at least SOME questions put firmly forward.
Meanwhile, in Alternative Star Wars/Vorkosigan/Awesome SciFi Hodgepodge campaign setting, Vanya's latest story is almost straight detective work, with only a vague smidgen of the braid. The problem would be that most of the on-stage work belongs to the Roughnecks and the Fortune Hunters, and Vanya is baffled by the sheer ingenuity with which they get themselves in and out of trouble. The pirates don't see a whole lot of use for "the troopers' pet Jedilette" and aren't giving her much info at all; meanwhile the clones have a very unique viewpoint on what data is worth noting as they interact with the citizenry of the Free World port, and anyway they have their own secrets to keep at this point. As a private eye, Vanya was used to the notion that all clients lie ... the problem is that she's in this mess because "her guys" are in hot water and she's available to help bail, not because the client who first hired her has any vested interest in these events. She's only getting paid to do a background check on a potential supplier. Most of her time and effort have to be invested in satisfying that problem, ergo offscreen, and it would be silly to have her pop into a critical scene just because it's so much easier for me to write when looking through her eyes than through an anonymous viewpoint. In fact, she wouldn't have been in the story at all if Higgins hadn't uttered the Famous Last Words, "Sure we have to report, but if we report by email, it'll take days for the Chain of Command to react at all. We're more than five systems away from the nearest unit lead." And by the braid hanging near her right ear, VN Ysadora officially counts as "Chain of Command", as they repeatedly remind her when she doesn't want to hear it, so it's only logical for her to be on-planet when the Roughnecks dare say they've got plenty of time.
But despite the structure in my head, the words won't come on paper, or onscreen, or in voice notes. I know where I am, I know where I need to be, I know (more or less) how to get there, but ... great big blank stall. When I force it, the results uniformly stink: too verbose, or too vague. Too formal in the dialogue. Too much uniformity to how different characters speak. The whole thing is grey and unconvincing.
Maybe I need to sacrifice something to the Muse? Something shiny and distracting. Capricious might stick around long enough, if I come up with the correct sparkly victim. If the bank would send me my darned ATM card, I could go looking for bizarre jewelry at the head shop or something.
Hey, I wonder what KILLJOY's doing for lunch today? We could go get dead cow and analyze masculine derrieres.
Feral's not the sort of person destined to die of old age; she knows that, I know that, and we've both known since we met, back in late 1991. Actually, now that I think of it, I think I was starting to form the basis of the character back in the late eighties, but the woman I know really bears very little resemblance to the proto-idea I first contemplated back when ThunderCats started airing right after the "English for NYC Spanish Speakers" show I used to watch before school every morning. (( Parenthetically, if you're taking a foreign language class first thing in the school day, I cannot highly enough recommend two tools: read comic books actually written for native speakers of the language you're trying to learn, not those Learning Tools marketed to your teacher with perfectly stilted grammar; and watch a program to teach native speakers of said language how to speak your own native language, preferably while you're getting dressed and making your bed. My vocabulary was lousy but I could talk my way around most subjects even if I couldn't figure out the word I was supposed to be using, and it entertained my teacher well enough that I got away with it half the time. Me and my Californian+New Yawrker Latina accent.... ))
I digressed. Sorry.
Anyhow, God knows we haven't always liked each other, and she embodies a surprising amount of my judgmental side, but we've gotten pretty comfortable inside each others' skins. As I said, we've both always known she'd die of either stupidity or need, bad decision on her part or saving others. She'd prefer the latter, of course: she thinks it's the only path to redemption that she hasn't already destroyed. Other people around her would disagree, but they don't seem to have any clue just how integral to her core motivation is the idea she has that she needs to atone for past misdeeds and failures. She doesn't discuss it, after all, not even a vague mention. She also thinks her supposed sins are a lot more terrible than they actually are, which is a lot of her problem in the first place. It's a kind of hubris that I'd like to see her recognize and avoid, but it's not central to events often enough for us to get any real work done on it. We've had some progress over the years, but nowhere near enough, and now she's lying on the flagstones with the prong of a grappling hook jammed into a particularly delicate section of the torso, endangering so many fast-bleeding vital organs that her regenerative abilities (way below Wolverinish levels) really have no logical ability to keep up, and she's just gotten a glimpse of her current archnemesis -- who, of course, wanted her to see him just long enough to know who'd arranged the whole trap -- and instead of focusing on getting help so she can survive, her mind keeps drifting back to the way she thought (years ago) she would die, looking up through the branches of a tree at the afternoon sky ....
.... and that's exactly where the scene freezes. Dead? Snaps out of it? The other characters on her side know she's in trouble but nobody's got Supervision or magic fixit powers, they can't save her if she won't tell them "extract the sharp pointy thing quickly and stop the leaking and watch out for Stirge while I'm unconscious, he won't like it if I'm not bleeding to death and he'll probably try to interfere again". But one of them's telepathic enough that she's not slipping into her death fantasy without at least SOME questions put firmly forward.
Meanwhile, in Alternative Star Wars/Vorkosigan/Awesome SciFi Hodgepodge campaign setting, Vanya's latest story is almost straight detective work, with only a vague smidgen of the braid. The problem would be that most of the on-stage work belongs to the Roughnecks and the Fortune Hunters, and Vanya is baffled by the sheer ingenuity with which they get themselves in and out of trouble. The pirates don't see a whole lot of use for "the troopers' pet Jedilette" and aren't giving her much info at all; meanwhile the clones have a very unique viewpoint on what data is worth noting as they interact with the citizenry of the Free World port, and anyway they have their own secrets to keep at this point. As a private eye, Vanya was used to the notion that all clients lie ... the problem is that she's in this mess because "her guys" are in hot water and she's available to help bail, not because the client who first hired her has any vested interest in these events. She's only getting paid to do a background check on a potential supplier. Most of her time and effort have to be invested in satisfying that problem, ergo offscreen, and it would be silly to have her pop into a critical scene just because it's so much easier for me to write when looking through her eyes than through an anonymous viewpoint. In fact, she wouldn't have been in the story at all if Higgins hadn't uttered the Famous Last Words, "Sure we have to report, but if we report by email, it'll take days for the Chain of Command to react at all. We're more than five systems away from the nearest unit lead." And by the braid hanging near her right ear, VN Ysadora officially counts as "Chain of Command", as they repeatedly remind her when she doesn't want to hear it, so it's only logical for her to be on-planet when the Roughnecks dare say they've got plenty of time.
But despite the structure in my head, the words won't come on paper, or onscreen, or in voice notes. I know where I am, I know where I need to be, I know (more or less) how to get there, but ... great big blank stall. When I force it, the results uniformly stink: too verbose, or too vague. Too formal in the dialogue. Too much uniformity to how different characters speak. The whole thing is grey and unconvincing.
Maybe I need to sacrifice something to the Muse? Something shiny and distracting. Capricious might stick around long enough, if I come up with the correct sparkly victim. If the bank would send me my darned ATM card, I could go looking for bizarre jewelry at the head shop or something.
Hey, I wonder what KILLJOY's doing for lunch today? We could go get dead cow and analyze masculine derrieres.
